Illinois’ Democratic-led legislature approved new boundaries for the General Assembly aimed at ensuring their control for the next decade, sending their redistricting maps to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has backed off a campaign pledge to veto a partisan-drawn plan.
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Senators voted 41-18 and the House followed suit 71-45, both party-line roll calls, on maps setting the boundaries of the state’s 118 House and 59 Senate districts starting with next year’s elections. The voting came as Democrats and Republicans heatedly re-litigated past fights over their partisan ideologies.
Earlier Friday, also along party lines, the House voted 72-45 and the Senate 41-18 to rewrite the boundaries of the Illinois Supreme Court for the first time in nearly 60 years as Democrats sought to maintain their high court majority, sending the measure to Pritzker.
But the push for continued Democratic political control of Illinois through the mapmaking process hit a speed bump when the majority party opted not to move ahead with a redrawing of Illinois’ congressional districts because of delays in federal census results.
The delay in the census, in part due to the pandemic and also due to unsuccessful efforts by the Trump administration to avoid counting noncitizens, is at the center of the debate over the Democratic efforts to redraw state and federal political districts.
“We would not be here if Donald Trump’s Commerce Department had even a passing interest — even a passing interest — in an accurate and a prompt census,” Senate President Don Harmon, an Oak Park Democrat, said over audible groans from Republicans on the Senate floor.
The census has traditionally been the basis for redistricting and statistics are usually released in April. But final census figures are not due until at least mid-August. That runs up against a number of dates on Illinois’ political calendar.
To make a June 30 constitutional deadline for lawmakers to come up with a state legislative map, Democrats are pressing ahead using population estimates from the American Community Survey. The survey is a product of the U.S. Census Bureau, but lacks the specific details of the federal census count.
Failure to meet the June 30 date would set in motion a process where Republicans would have a 50-50 chance at wresting control of the legislative map from Democrats.
There is no similar June 30 constitutional deadline for congressional maps. But if Democrats rely on survey estimates to draw the boundaries instead of actual census figures, they could face a federal court challenge over voting rights and one-person, one-vote requirements.
The final census data is not expected to arrive until just before candidates in next year’s March primary would begin circulating candidacy petitions at the end of August. That prompted Democrats to look at moving the primary date to June, which would provide additional time for candidates to circulate petitions.
As for the legislative maps, Democrats unveiled their final draft on Thursday night. The latest map proposals tweaked some boundaries at the request of community groups and reduced the number of House Republicans who would be pitted against each other. Now there are seven districts where two GOP incumbents would run against each other based on their home addresses.
“It’s not a perfect map. We’ve had to work and balance. You’re going to have some people who are very happy with it and some that are not going to be quite happy,” said state Rep. Lisa Hernandez, a Cicero Democrat who chairs the House Redistricting Committee.
As they have throughout the redistricting process, Republicans criticized the map as based on flawed data. Democrats had been reticent in explaining the source of data behind their maps until last week, when they acknowledged using survey estimates.
On Thursday night, Democrats also acknowledged the use of “public election data” in drawing the maps. The party preferences of Illinois voters who cast primary ballots is public record.
Rep. Tom Demmer of Dixon, a member of the Republican leadership, accused Democrats of “an intentional effort to withhold data sources from both members of this committee and from the general public in order to deprive us of the opportunity to analyze the maps that were offered.”
“That’s incredibly frustrating, and frankly it makes a mockery of this process,” Demmer said.
But Rep. Curtis Tarver of Chicago, the Democratic vice chair of the redistricting panel, noted that a paid consultant hired by Democrats hailed the map they drew a decade ago as a “model” across the nation. Saying the new legislative map is based off the 2011 boundaries, Tarver said that “minority communities have the ability to choose and elect their candidates.”
Passage of the legislative map now puts it into the hands of Pritzker, who supported an independent commission to draw new boundaries in an effort to remove politics from the process. In his successful run for office, Pritzker also vowed to veto a partisan-drawn map.
In April, Pritzker backed away from his vow to veto a partisan drawn map, saying he was looking to see what the legislature produced. On May 19, in his most recent public comments to reporters, Pritzker said, “I’ll veto an unfair map, that’s for sure.” That was prior to the release of the Democratic maps.
Republicans, with no input on the redistricting process, have repeatedly called on Pritzker to live up to his campaign pledge including during the floor debate. Sen. Jason Barickman, R-Bloomington, challenged Pritzker to issue a veto if he wants to “put the stamp of authenticity on his claims to be a reformer.”
Rep. Jay Hoffman of Swansea, a member of Democratic leadership, accused Republicans of trying to stall out the process in an effort to win a post-June 30 lottery that would put them in charge of the map.
“Let’s not hide behind issues concerning saying ‘we want fair maps.’ Let’s talk about what it really is—you wanting to take back control of the Illinois House of Representatives and the Illinois Senate,” Hoffman said of the GOP.
“You really want to move us back into the Rauner tyranny days,” he said, citing former one-term Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, whose push to weaken Democratic allies in organized labor led to a two-year budget deadlock.
Ten years ago, Democrats held the majorities in the legislature and under then-Gov. Pat Quinn drew the current map lines. Democrats now hold a 73-45 House majority and a 41-18 Senate advantage over Republicans.
Democrats have been the majority in the House since 1997, when they took control under a Republican-drawn map, and have held the upper hand in the Senate since 2003 when they won the majority under a Democratic-written map
The redrawing of Illinois Supreme Court boundaries by Democrats is a rare event, with the boundaries last decided as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the court system that dates to 1964.
Illinois has seven Supreme Court justices — three in Cook County, which is one district, and one for each of four districts for the rest of the state. Democrats sought to justify redrawing the boundaries as an effort to equalize population disparities that had grown over the decades.
But Democrats also want to preserve their 4-3 advantage on the court, something they fear could evaporate as a result of last year’s election when Democrat Thomas Kilbride of Rock Island became the first justice to lose retention in a district that is rapidly turning Republican.
With three justices based in Cook County, Democrats need to win one of two seats up for election in November 2022 to keep their majority.
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Senate Republican leader Dan McConchie of Hawthorn Woods said most people “see the courts as typically above this sort of politics” and that the Democratic remapping “drags our Supreme Court down into that process” of partisanship.
“We should do better,” he said. “This, frankly, ladies and gentlemen, is the pursuit of power at all costs.”
Harmon, the Senate president, argued Republicans sought to try to gain control through their own redistricting of the high court as their brief two-year stint in one-party control was coming to an end in 1997, only to see their effort ruled as unconstitutional.
The latest redistricting, Harmon said, was needed because the four districts outside Cook County are supposed to be of “substantially equal” population. The largely collar county 2nd District had more than 3.1 million people compared with two Downstate districts with populations of less than 1.3 million each.
“We on this side of the aisle do believe in one-person, one-vote and if you believe in that, you can’t stand by idly,” Harmon said. “This is just about rebalancing the population across the four judicial districts. If you believe in one-person, one-vote, you’ll vote ‘yes.'”